What is Pinterest? How to use Pinterest

By Clifford P on February 24, 2012

Pinterest is a social network to share images or videos, one at a time. Users can comment, like, or re-pin. In order to sign up, you’ll need either a Facebook login or a Twitter login. Pinterest doesn’t have its own login option at this time.

Pinterest’s copyright terms have come into question because 1) it says Members cannot post something they aren’t allowed to post, and 2) Pinterest can pretty much do whatever they want with the Member content (e.g. Pinned images). See the “Member Content” section in Pinterest’s Terms to read for yourself.

Pinterest’s YouTube channel, with video tutorials on how to add the Pinterest bookmarklet.

Pinterest Tips

One of the distinctive features of Pinterest compared with Facebook is that you can follow a Member’s individual Boards, or you can follow all of a Member’s Boards. This is like following certain categories of Facebook posts from an individual Facebook user… if Facebook posts had categories.

It’s like telling Pinterest member “Fictitious Susie” that you’re interested in her “Home Decorating” pins but not her “Hunting and Fishing” pins.

Fictitious Susie might have 10 following all her Boards, 20 following her Home Decorating Board, and 23 following her Hunting and Fishing Board.

My least favorite part of Pinterest is that only large resolution images can be pinned. Pinterest won’t let you pin a URL that doesn’t have images or that has images smaller than Pinterest’s chosen size. I’m not recommending that you upload really high-res photos and take up unnecessary server space and slow down your web page loading time. Instead, try pinning your own content as a test to make sure the image(s) you want Pinterest to find actually work.

Don’t load images via Flash or JavaScript if you want them to appear on Pinterest.

How to take full-page screenshots of any URL (with cropping funtionality and Pinterest integration): http://snapito.com/ – so you can Pin websites that don’t have images (Thanks, Wayne Harriman.)

Pinterest has become one of the largest referring sites. In other words, people pin stuff from a website and people click on the pin’s image, which takes them to the website where the pin originated from.

How to disallow Pinning things from your website (boo!?):

source: http://blog.pinterest.com/post/17949261591/growing-up

You can’t pin anything from a URL that includes “pinterest.com”, and that includes their own blog posts. Maybe they don’t even realize that, but that’s the way it is as of this writing.

Include a dollar sign and numbers (e.g. $15) in your Pin and Pinterest will slap a ribbon across the image to show the price. And then it’ll also show up in the Gifts drop-down from the top menu bar: http://pinterest.com/gifts/. Pretty neat.